In the House of the Hangman 1547

So here is my ghost voice amplification helmet & here is the engine you built from the ‘black box’ (unhinged in fairytale), up up and BEAUTY my wool over the miso, I’m serious, I’m going to the tomatoes to have poetry, big old honking vacuums, Purity? Wholeness? Wait. Now, I’m in a different apartment in Chicago. I have a warmer coat and new boots. I have oranger hair. Or, my hair is more orange? As Mos Def would have it, “Hiphop is going where we going. So the next time you ask yourself, ‘Where’s hiphop going,’ ask yourself ‘Where am I going?’” The same is surely true of … What? Sorry, I Was Doing Backflips. The pavilion has walls of rug when I’m a knight with blood foaming out my chainmail so I lie down on my cot in the cool darkness and when I close my eyes the falcons alight on my page’s glove. Do you remember the days of slavery. Do you remember the days of slavery. I am wan and dowdy and I sleep on the floor. I had my back to the TV and I was sweeping, but I’m fairly certain they just said of one poor unfortunate she was “paralyzed from the nose down.” Don’t worry. She made a full recovery. It was an evil husband putting something in her food, but she was harder than Rasputin to kill. And forget about Pluto. We don’t talk about Pluto. There’s probably a State Department advisory telling you not to visit. We no longer recognize its government. It’s not even a planet, it’s more like a Motel 6 now. Lara, you’re right to detect annoyance in my expression. My thighs are sticking to an inflatable couch. Still, I am tempted to characterize my transcendental materialism as an emergent dual-aspect monism, albeit with the significant qualification that these ‘aspects’ and their ineradicable divisions (such as mind and matter, the asubjective and subjective, and the natural and the more-than-natural) enjoy the heft of actual existence (rather than being, as they are in Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism, epiphenomena deprived of true ontological substantiality). One of the questions animating my philosophical program is: What sort of ontology of ‘first nature’ (i.e., the one-and-only original reality of material substances) allows for the genesis of a ‘second nature’ (i.e., minded and like-minded autonomous subjects as epistemologically inexplicable and ontologically irreducible with reference to natural material substances alone) – a second nature immanently transcending first nature and requiring theorization in a manner that avoids the mirror-image dual traps of reductive / eliminative monisms and idealist / spiritualist dualisms? Or. I’d rather, would you rather, some fashion predictions? Accessories, like headbands, made of crepe paper dipped in silicon. Lenticularly printed tumblr jackets covered in gifs. Pigeon leggings which glow the closer you get to your return location. Skirt hems that when touched by human fingers emit prerecorded messages. Birthday candle earrings. Tee-shirts with pictures of empty living rooms. Texas wildflower manicures. Papel piccato cut oil cloth draped over black chiffon. Velvet eyebrow polish. Cy Twombly print belts with famous suffragette cameo buckles. A parakeet strings its feathers across a laundry line, leaving to dry what covered its fragile bird heart. She kept on thinking she was wrong. Then, she thought she was right. Then the rug said, “I am the nature of the universe.” The wicker stool said, “I am the nature of the universe.” The white orchid said, “I am the nature of the universe.” They all laughed together, as laughter was the nature of the universe too — and there were bags full of little books and he gives one to everyone except you, and then he gives you one, a different one, a nomad eyelash one that blinks only when it has reached its place of pilgrimage — and tho ‘The dirt holds eight immutable truths’, I can list but six of them —